Cop Car's Beat

MEV-1

For the first time, a spacecraft has returned an aging satellite to service

It’s a big step forward for satellite servicing.

Eric Berger - 4/17/2020, 8:21 AM

 

In a triumph for the nascent industry of "satellite servicing," an aging communications satellite has returned to service in geostationary orbit.

Northrop Grumman announced Friday that its Mission Extension Vehicle-1, or MEV-1, has restored the Intelsat 901 satellite and relocated it into a position to resume operations.

....

For more of the story and a great video, please click on the above title that is linked to the Ars Technica article.

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Disclosure: Each month I draw a pension check from Northrop Grumman. They know nothing of my blog and/or postings so no endorsement of any sort is implied.

Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA)

Credit Hunky Husband with sending me the link to the following, 43-second video. Neither he nor I am receiving direct payment for our interest in Boeing defense products; although, most of our "family wealth" is tied up in HH's Voluntary Investment Plan with Boeing and HH draws retirement pay from Boeing. I recommend viewing the video in full-screen mode.

Basic Rules for Aircraft Pilots

This is one of those mornings when I have no control over myself; thus, I'll post this listing that WichiDude emailed me in January 2005. One of us may well have posted it 'way back then. [I r-e-a-l-l-y need to finish reviewing the files on the backup CDs and get on with my life!]

• Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.
• You know that your landing gear is up and locked when it takes full power to taxi to the terminal.
• The Piper Cub is the safest airplane in the world. It can just barely kill you.
• Blue water Navy truism: There are more planes in the ocean than there are submarines in the sky.
• If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it's probably a helicopter -- and, therefore, unsafe.
• When one engine fails on a twin-engine airplane, you always have enough power left to get you to the scene of the crash.
• Without ammunition, NavAir and USAF would just be expensive flying clubs.
• I remember when sex was safe and flying was dangerous.
• If you're faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible.
• You've never been lost until you've been lost at Mach 3.
• Never fly in the same cockpit with someone braver than you.
• Just remember: If you crash because of weather, your funeral will be held on a sunny day.
• When a flight is proceeding incredibly well, something was forgotten.
• The three most common expressions (aka famous last words) in aviation are: "Why is it doing that?", "Where are we?", and "Uh oh."

Sometimes, the timing is perfect

While awaiting the arrival of the JoJac crew who are to do more cleanup work in our woods, today, I watched the podcast of the abort test of Boeing's Starliner Spacecraft, in real time. The best part starts at about 23:30 into the video. There had been a hold of about 15 minutes.

More from slashdot.org - autolanding system

Graphic from AOPA website

Would You Trust a Self-Landing Plane? (aopa.org) 59

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 03, 2019 @12:34PM from the fright-or-flight dept.

"Lots of hay has been made over self-driving, self-parking, and summon features of new cars," writes Shotgun (Slashdot reader #30,919). "Now Garmin has a system that will land your plane for you."

He shares this new report from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association: During this first-ever autoland for me, nothing felt terribly out of the ordinary until the final 100 feet or so when it finally sunk in that in a few seconds we would be hitting the pavement and no one had their hands on the yoke.

But just as briefed, the airplane "decrabbed" from the 10-knot left crosswind and soon plunked us down just left of center on Runway 18 at New Century AirCenter in Olathe, Kansas, and then quickly tracked us back to the centerline. A few seconds later we rolled to a stop... Such was my introduction to Garmin's new autoland system, a first in general aviation...

While the notion of an autoland system seems futuristic, Garmin has been quietly working on it since 2011 and conducted its first autoland in a Columbia piston-powered airplane in 2014 and first briefed the FAA on it in 2015. Since then it has conducted some 800 autolands... Someday, with more experience and the FAA more comfortable with the notion, perhaps Autoland will be available on any given flight where the pilot doesn't feel up to the landing. Meanwhile, it's a great safety feature. "This will save lives," said Ron Gunnarson, Piper's vice president of sales, marketing, and customer support. Once certified, the system will be standard on the 2020 M600 SLS models... Cirrus plans to offer Autoland as a standard feature on the 2020 models.
The article describes it as "a digital parachute" for the pilot and passengers in emergency situations. And the original submission argues that it brings to general aviation a safety feature that the big airliners have already had for years.

T-7A

Hunky Husband forwarded an email to me that he had received from The Boeing Company, from which I excerpted the text below the photo.

The U.S. Air Force has named the Boeing T-X the T-7A Red Hawk. Named and designed to honor the Tuskegee Airmen who flew the red-tailed P-51 Mustang in World War II, the T-7A Red Hawk will train future U.S. Air Force pilots for decades to come.

 

 

Boeing has several more videos posted here.

 

Boeing's win of the contract from USAF was announced one year ago. The St Louis Post-Dispatch carried the announcement on 9/28/2019 in Boeing's St. Louis plant wins major $9.2 billion contract for new Air Force training jet by Jacob Barker. Production is at Boeing's (previously, McDonald Aircraft then McDonald/Douglas) facility on Lambert Field in St Louis.

 

Interesting (to me) side note: I think I saw a couple of T-Xs in flight over McConnell AFB the other day. I had made a mental note to ask HH if he knew of any foreign aircraft taking part in anything at McConnell - and - promptly forgot, of course, until I saw the photo of the T-7A. HH asked if they had red tails. As I was driving in traffic at the time, I could only note the weird silhouettes.

More from Slashdot.org - Grading Tests, Nuking Mars, Using Old Tech

The following item from Slashdot.org is an excellent rehashing of the reason we were always told "show your work" on tests!

How Should Schools Grade Unexpected-But-Correct Answers On Coding Tests? 76

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 18, 2019 @07:34AM from the does-not-compute dept.

 

There can be more than one correct answer for academic tests of programming ability, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp:

 

Take the first of the Free-Response Questions in this year's AP CS A exam, which asked 70,000 college-bound students to "Write the static method numberOfLeapYears, which returns the number of leap years between year1 and year2." The correct answer, according to the CollegeBoard's 2019 Scoring Guidelines, entails iterating over the range of years and invoking a provided helper method called isLeapYear for each year.

Which does work, of course, but what if a student instead took an Excel-like approach to the same problem that consists of a (hopefully correct!) single formula with no iteration or isLeapYear helper function? Would that be a worse — or better -- example of computational thinking than the endorsed AP CS A Java-based solution? (Here's a 7-minute AP Conference discussion of how to correctly grade this problem)?

So, how have you seen schools and companies deal with unexpected-but-correct approaches to coding test questions?

 

I'm not sure how I should feel about the following item.

Elon Musk Begins Selling $25 'Nuke Mars' T-Shirts (bgr.com) 83

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @06:34PM from the making-a-statement dept.

 

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

 

The following item makes this oldster chortle.

US Navy Tests WWII-ERA Messaging Tech: Dropping Bean Bags Onto Ships (popularmechanics.com) 70

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @05:34PM from the cornhole-code dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr writes: In World War II, pilots would air-drop messages onto ships using bean-bags. Just as with sextants a few years ago, the Navy is bringing back old tech, because it works.

Just as during the Doolittle Raid of Tokyo, the purpose is to prevent eavesdropping. You can read more about the modern bean-bag-drop on Military.com or Popular Mechanics. There's a video about the Doolittle Raid hosted at archive.org with bean-bag-drops at 2:39 and 5:19 into the video. I wonder how many high-density SSD drives fit in a standard Navy bean-bag?
"In a future conflict with a tech-savvy opponent, the U.S. military could discover even its most advanced, secure communications penetrated by the enemy," notes Popular Mechanics. "Secure digital messaging, voice communications, video conferencing, and even chats could be intercepted and decrypted for its intelligence value.

"This could give enemy forces an unimaginable advantage, seemingly predicting the moves and actions of the fleets at sea with uncanny accuracy."

Spitfire on Tour

“This Spitfire is from 1943 and it flew 51 times in in the war and 51 missions and then shortly after the war went to a museum. And so when we rolled it out three years ago, it was all there but it had to be completely rebuilt. So we stripped 80,000 rivets out of it."

Thus, Steve Brooks introduced us to the actual aircraft that he and Matt Jones plan to fly around the world during an interview by Robin Young on National Public Radio's Here and Now program this afternoon. Ms Young had started her program with the following paragraph.

"Starting August 5, aviators Steve Brooks and Matt Jones will be taking the 76-year-old Spitfire to new heights, traveling 27,000 miles around the world in a 4-month expedition. Brooks and Jones plan to make more than 150 stops in nearly 30 countries, including South Korea, Pakistan, Egypt and Russia."

The flight is scheduled to begin next Monday, August 5, 2019. Listed on their plan published by IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN are two airports in the United States - airports in Teterboro, New Jersey, and in Santa Monica, California. As the range of the Spitfire is not transcontinental, it stands to reason that other airports will be used in-between. I'm hoping that they come close enough to us that we might see the plane this month.

The Merlin engine is worth taking a listen to.

 

Published on Dec 7, 2013

Video and Audio content is
Copyright © 2013 Malcolm Auld

For those too young to recall: The Spitfire was fielded with various propeller configurations. My favorite was the five-bladed propeller of the later Spitfires.

Wikipedia has a good article on the Spitfire.

More from Slashdot.com - Star Trek, Ternary Semiconductors, & Aircraft Black Boxes

Comic-Con Trailers Include 'Star Trek: Picard' and HBO's 'Watchmen' Series (cbsnews.com) 132

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday July 21, 2019 @04:34PM from the engaged dept.

"At Comic-Con, Sir Patrick Stewart took to the Hall H stage Saturday afternoon to discuss his new series, Star Trek: Picard," reports CBS News: The series will focus on what caused famed captain and admiral Jean-Luc Picard to leave Starfleet, and his life since.... Patrick Stewart -- who is also an executive producer -- answered questions about the show. "We never know, do we, when our best moment will be. And that is now," Stewart said. "I knew something unusual would happen. I knew I needed to be a part of it."

Stewart has been heavily involved in crafting "Star Trek: Picard" and frequently visits the writer's room... Brent Spiner, who played the character Data on TNG, said there was "no way" he could say no to the opportunity to work with Stewart again....

The show is set 20 years after the events of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" around the year 2399. This sets the series further into the future than any previous Star Trek series. But fans should not expect to see the same Jean-Luc Picard they know from "The Next Generation" series. During the press tour, Kurtzman teased that the show will be very different and "grounded." The series will explore how Picard has changed in that time, making him reckon with the choices he has made. Kurtzman hinted that there are circumstances that have "radically" shifted that have caused the beloved Starfleet admiral to question his life decisions.
The two-minute trailer includes a surprising cameo, and Variety reports that CBS has also committed to two seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks, an animated series focused on "the support crew serving on one of Starfleet's least important ships." (They also report that Seth MacFarlane announced season 3 of The Orville will be moving from Fox to Hulu.)

Also at Comic-Con, HBO shared the first full trailer for their upcoming Watchmen TV series, a sequel to the original Alan Moore graphic novel. Rolling Stone quotes HBO as saying that Watchmen "takes place in an alternative, contemporary reality in the United States, in which masked vigilantes became outlawed due to their violent methods."

Marvel also revealed that their next Thor movie (Thor: Love and Thunder) will incude both Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman as Lady Thor, and shared footage from their upcoming Black Widow movie. And CNET has a comprehensive rundown (with trailers) of all the DC Comics superhero shows on the CW network, including Arrow, Supergirl, The Flash, Black Lightning, and Batwoman.

 

 

Samsung-Backed Researchers Develop a Ternary Semiconductor (zdnet.com) 32

Posted by EditorDavid on Monday July 22, 2019 @07:34AM from the bits-versus-trits dept.

"Future semiconductors may perform logic with 0, 1, or 2 instead of the current binary system of 0 and 1," reports ZDNet: A South Korean research team has successfully realised an energy-efficient ternary metal-oxide semiconductor on a large-sized wafer. Professor Kyung Rok Kim of UNIST's Electrical & Computer Engineering Department and his team successfully created a semiconductor that operates in a ternary logic system instead of the current binary...

Using the ternary system of 0, 1, 2 lessens the amount of information semiconductors need to process and does it faster, resulting in less power consumption, the team said. It will also help in miniaturising chips further. For example, to express the number 128 in the current binary system, 8 "bits" will be required. With the ternary system, only 5 "trits" will be required....

Samsung Electronics has been backing Kim's research since September 2017 via its Samsung's Science & Technology Foundation, which offers grants for promising technology projects. Samsung is currently verifying the technology at its foundry business-run fab.

 

 

The Inventor Who Fought To Get Black Box Flight Recorders Into Every Plane (bbc.com) 71

 

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday July 21, 2019 @03:34AM from the before-the-black-box dept.

This week the BBC told the remarkable story of the man who invented the "black box" flight recorders -- and of all the resistance he enountered [sic] along the way.

dryriver shared this summary: In 1934, a passenger plane name Miss Hobart crashed into the sea off the coast of Australia. Among those killed was Anglican missionairy Rev Hubert Warren, whose last gift to his 8 year old son David had been a crystal radio set.

Young David Warren spent hours a day tinkering with the radio, eventually learning enough electronics engineering to build his own radios and sell them to other people. David Warren later grew to be a Rocket Scientist working for Australia's Aeronautical Research Laboratories. In 1953, the department loaned him to an expert panel trying to solve a costly and distressing mystery: why did the British de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner and the great hope of the new Jet Age, keep crashing? David Warren was confronted with a daunting problem -- how to determine from heavily deformed crashed plane fragments what had happened to the plane while it was in the air... Warren had an interesting idea -- what if every plane in the sky had a mini recorder in the cockpit...?

Warren's superior did not approve of the idea and told him to stick to chemicals and fuels.

When Warren got a new boss, the new boss was more sympathetic, but told him to do the R&D for it in complete secrecy. Since it wasn't a government-approved venture or a war-winning weapon, it couldn't be seen to take up lab time or money. "If I find you talking to anyone, including me, about this matter, I will have to sack you." When Warren first floated the idea of a cockpit recorder publicly, the pilots' union responded with fury, branding the recorder a snooping device, and insisted "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening."

Undeterred, Warren took to his garage and invented the first "Black Box" flight recorder.

Helium hydride

From NASA's SOFIA page, an excerpt:

April 17, 2019

 

The Universe’s First Type of Molecule Is Found at Last

Illustration of planetary nebula NGC 7027 and helium hydride molecules. In this planetary nebula, SOFIA detected helium hydride, a combination of helium (red) and hydrogen (blue), which was the first type of molecule to ever form in the early universe. This is the first time helium hydride has been found in the modern universe.

Credits: NASA/SOFIA/L. Proudfit/D.Rutter

The first type of molecule that ever formed in the universe has been detected in space for the first time, after decades of searching. Scientists discovered its signature in our own galaxy using the world’s largest airborne observatory, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, as the aircraft flew high above the Earth’s surface and pointed its sensitive instruments out into the cosmos.

When the universe was still very young, only a few kinds of atoms existed. Scientists believe that around 100,000 years after the big bang, helium and hydrogen combined to make a molecule called helium hydride for the first time. Helium hydride should be present in some parts of the modern universe, but it has never been detected in space — until now.

SOFIA found modern helium hydride in a planetary nebula, a remnant of what was once a Sun-like star. Located 3,000 light-years away near the constellation Cygnus, this planetary nebula, called NGC 7027, has conditions that allow this mystery molecule to form. The discovery serves as proof that helium hydride can, in fact, exist in space. This confirms a key part of our basic understanding of the chemistry of the early universe and how it evolved over billions of years into the complex chemistry of today. The results are published in this week’s issue of Nature.

….

Helium hydride is a finicky molecule. Helium itself is a noble gas making it very unlikely to combine with any other kind of atom. But in 1925, scientists were able to create the molecule in a laboratory by coaxing the helium to share one of its electrons with a hydrogen ion.

….

ADDITION OF 4/27/2019 - Ethan Siegel's further treatment on the subject is quite interesting. He blogs at Starts with a Bang!